It’s no secret that local authorities up and down the country are facing an avalanche of issues due to the constant churn of agency social work staff. With more and more staff struggling with unsustainable caseloads, less flexibility in hybrid working post covid, and many councils struggling to meet inflated rates, the turnover of staff is higher than ever. But can this issue force real change in the way that local authorities view their transformation and innovation goals, and ensure that councils develop a better, more long-term recruitment strategy that benefits both themselves and the workers on the frontline.
Innovation and partnership are helping
In a recent monitoring visit to Stoke on Trent Council, officers found no children in immediate risk of harm and praised the manager's line of sight on practice “through a firmly embedded quality assurance framework”. This review marks 3 years of progress within the council, which in 2019 found its inspection to be inadequate. As a result, Stoke was recommended to enter a partnership with Leeds Council, which had been rated ‘outstanding’. This move, overseen by the current commissioner Paul Moffat, encouraged a real change in the Stoke Council and resulted in this most recent inspection being the third consecutive one to show improvement. The partnership, which focussed on Leeds’ relationship-based practice, resonated with the social workers, who went on to better understand the lived experiences of children and produced detailed assessments and directions for future work.
While this partnership produced largely positive results, inspectors noted the “inconsistency in the quality of social work practice” which they attributed partly to workforce stability issues, despite praise for the progress managers made in trying to curb this. It is clear despite innovation, authorities face a continuous and ongoing battle to strive for improved quality of practice, brought about by instability in their service. We should, however, not ignore the huge steps made by the partnership between these councils and note that similar setups would be hugely beneficial in allowing social workers to adopt an already successful model which has been proven to significantly mitigate a negative experience of the service user.
Fixed term models- are they the answer?
However, implementing a model that has a wrap-around positive effect on social workers, service users and council operations themselves may only be achieved by more of a fixed-term model that is implemented to curb the gap between agency and permanent staff, ensuring better stability alongside a shared interest in successful and beneficial practice model.
Our recent implementation at Bradford City Council proved to be successful in building resilience across the service and stabilising staff numbers which in turn, also provided continuity for vulnerable children and young people. Our workforce analysis identified a need for additional capacity so our team developed a locality service that consisted of 1 Service Manager, 3 Team Managers and 18 Level 3 Social Workers, who followed a new and improved model of working that engaged workers on a 12 month fixed term contract. Our service gave the council capacity to hold an additional 360 cases which gave other teams rest bite, increased the quality of work, decreased the churn of staff and kept staff morale at a high.
It is clear that we are heading in the right direction in terms of finding new ways to solve issues presented by a high turnover of the agency staff. Partnerships between struggling councils and those with successful practice models allow for ironing out of practice-based issues and allow for the issues of churn and turnover to be better highlighted, but we should actively prioritise a solution where the gap between temp and perm staff is brought closer together.
If your local authority is looking for a workforce analysis and implementation, our specialist team are here to help. You can get in touch by emailing info@imperiumsolutions.co.uk or booking a call here.
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